April 26, 2011

Marfa Lights - Best MP Posts

The latest nonfiction book by James Bunnell, Hunting Marfa Lights, has an interesting title when we consider recent research and data from that book, for a new explanation seems to turn the title upside down: "Marfa Lights Hunting." . . .

Recorded sightings can be weeks or even months apart, and they can start at half an hour or over two hours after sunset. . . . Consider . . . [rare] sightings in which mystery lights appear two nights in a row. . . .

The nights of July 14th and 15th, 2006, are one of the exceptions, not only in being consecutive nights but in when the lights first appeared: 38 and 37 minutes after sunset. It suggests the bioluminescent-flying-predators hypothesis has merit, for on those occasional nights when a group of predators has a very successful hunt, they would be predicted to return the next night at the same time, hoping for another successful hunt.

Fred Tenny, an amateur astronomer . . . says that the Marfa mystery lights "have exhibited . . bobbing up and down, splitting and changing colors with occasional retrograde motion . . . Most of them have been red, occasionally fading to orange and very rarely yellow. I have seen individual ones split into as many as three, dance around each other and recombine."

This behavior is easier to understand in terms of a group of bioluminescent flying predators, rather than non-living sources. Why would balls of energy fly in such complex ways, splitting and later rejoining? . . . Whales have shown remarkable intelligence in coordinated hunting behavior; why should not a species of intelligent flying creatures coordinate their hunting?

I'll call it the "Huntington Hypothesis" (HH), this conjecture that the May 8, 2003, sighting by James Bunnell involved one flying predator that was chasing another one for many miles. Consider this carefully; I see no problem with this hypothesis. It involves a male flying predator chasing off a rival male, in a chase that lasted eleven miles.

This post quotes from the late-2010 press release and explains why car headlights do not explain away all lights that seem to fly near Marfa, Texas.

Many tourists who visit the Marfa Lights Viewing Platform (just east of Marfa) will gaze at the strange lights that flicker in the distance, to the southwest. They very well may wonder at the strageness, for night mirages sometimes cause car headlights on that highway to the southwest to behave unheadlight-like. But where else can tourists gaze? The true mystery lights that defy common-place explanations appear near Marfa only on a few nights each year and often where there is no highway. They have been photographed and studied by a scientist who has shown them to greatly differ from car headlights: James Bunnell, the author of Hunting Marfa Lights.